Last night I went to bid on an item.  Turns out my computer's clock was off by ten minutes, so I missed the auction.  The item expired without a sale.

I contact the seller and find out he has the same type of item (he's one of those "power seller" types) on another auction.  I bid on it, and some brand-new-registered person (probably the seller, IMNSHO) starts bidding against me to drive up the price.  I let him keep it.  Maybe he'll relist it, since he had four copies as of yesterday.

Now I've got one last chance to get the thing, from a flaky-sounding woman who's never sold anything before (but who has bought four items in the last three years).  Should I even bother bidding on it??

I always wait to the last minute or less to bid.  By then you know if its going to get bid up or not.  I'm not sure if I would buy from a new user.  Been there done that.
Bill3508

Bidders location (city) should be listed. I would never bid on an item
that the seller and a bidder were from the same city.

If she's only bought 4 items in 3 years, she's probably just as worried about getting ripped off as you are. Sometimes you have to take a chance. I would just use a credit card and take the risk myself if it was something I wanted bad enough and the price was right. Just my opinion.

What I do on ebay auctions is have 2 windows open when it comes down to the wire. The first window is the auction and the second is the one with the bid price field. I keep updating the auction window and keep track of the time. In the bid window I already have my max bid input so I can submit with just a few seconds left and hopefully win the auction.

find if any one has a "dutch" or a "buy it now"..

pst...
now I wanna know what it was...[;)]

71--

E-mail me for my patented secret for winning on Ebay.  I'll respond tomorrow sometime.

AFARR

I noticed.  My computer's clock is flaky.  I set it to match the official stock-market time around the middle of last week;  five or six days later, it's ten minutes slow.  Resetting it doesn't seem to help;  it drifts back to the wrong time on its own (and then stabilizes at that wrong time).  It's almost as if changing the time from inside Win98 doesn't set the system's hardware clock, but rather sets an OS-maintained offset (which Win98 doesn't maintain properly).  But AFAIK Win98 doesn't play that game.  (If it does, it's another reason to hate Microsoft's lousy software.)

I don't see any location information about the high bidder.  Since I don't know for certain that he was a shill, I wouldn't feel comfortable reporting him to the eCops.  Considering he bid up the price to well above what he could buy the same item from others, though, he must be an idiot if he isn't the seller.  Which is always possible -- when I was looking for a laptop last year, every single eBay auction got bid up to more than the laptop could be purchased for from a Pricewatch ad.  (Most of the sellers seem to wait for someone to pay way too much, then buy the laptop, then ship it to the sap;  their reserve prices were usually the cost-plus-shipping for them to buy from a Pricewatch merchant, plus a few bucks for their "trouble".)

I could have bid-sniped, but chose not to because the price would have been too much higher than the other auctions (with zero bids so far).  The item isn't something that enough people want for me to have to worry about being bid against -- which is the main reason I think the other bidder was really the seller.  There are several people selling, and most of the auctions for these items have zero bids, and close out without selling.

I ain't saying what it is, 'cause I need to get the next one. [:D]  Don't worry, you almost certainly wouldn't have a use for it anyway!  And if you do, you can buy it from me once I'm done with it in a few weeks, good as new, for a few bucks less than it sold to me for.